78 Ch. 2 • The Renaissance
could only be reestablished through “good laws and institutions/’ but these,
for Machiavelli, depended completely on military strength. He called on
the Medici to drive away the new barbarians. Machiavelli’s The Art of War
(1521) expressed hope that the brutish mercenaries who had devastated the
Italian peninsula would give way to soldier-citizens who would restore
virtue. But for the Italian city-states, it was too late.
Machiavelli’s invocation of “reasons of state” as sufficient justification for
political action and as a political principle in itself, and his open admiration
of ruthless rulers, would leave a chilling legacy, reflected by his belief that
the “ends justify the means.” While it is unlikely that Machiavelli had a
sense of the state in the impersonal, modern sense of the term, he held that
“good arms make good laws.”
The Decline of the City-States
For much of the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, in Italy foreign
armies fought against each other and against alliances formed by the city
states. The army of France in Italy reached 32,000 men by 1525, that of
Spain 100,000 soldiers. Only Venice could resist the two great powers. In
1521, the first war broke out between Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(King Charles I of Spain) and King Francis I of France, who became the first
Western ruler to ally with the Ottoman Turkish sultan. Charles V’s armies
decimated the French at Pavia, Italy, in 1525, carting the French king off to
Madrid, where he remained until his family paid a ransom. In 1527, Charles
V’s mercenary army, angry over lack of pay, sacked Rome. By the Peace of
Cambrai (1529), France gave up claims to Naples and Milan. But with the
exception of Venice, the Italian city-states were now in one way or another
dependent upon Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, as the Spanish army
repulsed new French invasions. In Rome, where Spanish merchants already
had a significant presence, the pope increasingly depended on the Holy
Roman emperor for defense against the Turks, as Charles added to his
resources by taxing ecclesiastical revenues.
The long wars drained the city-states of financial resources and men, dev
astating some of the countryside. Nobles, whose political power had been
diminished by the wealthy merchants of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies, took advantage of the chaos to return to prominence in some cities.
Patrician families struggled to maintain their authority against newcomers,
including wealthy merchants who had married into poorer noble lines and
who began to ape the styles of nobles. The Medici, after having once again
been expelled by republicans, reconquered their city in 1530 after a siege of
ten months. But in Florence, too, the Renaissance was over.
Artistic styles had already begun to reflect the loss of Renaissance self
confidence that accompanied the devastating impact of the French invasion.
Botticelli seemed to abandon the serenity and cheerful optimism that char
acterized the Renaissance. To his painting Mystical Nativity; Botticelli added